I looked and some of the things for "Timetraveler2 Hub Pages" direct to sites that have absolutely nothing to do with my work or HP, while others direct correctly. I have emailed the team about this but it appears to be some sort of glitch that may well be affecting our page views.

Yep. It's been a problem. My views dropped suddenly on the 9th, and they have not recovered. People have been talking about this Google algorithm update that happened that day, so I'm pretty sure that's what is causing this, for me at least.

My total views have also dropped. I've been watching this for the last few weeks. Not sure what is causing it. I also noted that flipboard is no longer giving me views whereas it used to. Channge in algorithm from Google?

I think you should rework some of your titles to reflect what people are searching for. For example, not many will be looking for "angry puppy", but they might be looking for "nervous puppy" or "aggressive puppy".

Yes, I've been on the other forum, too. But I posted here because I'm now wondering if there's a tech issue, like ads and formatting which was mentioned on one of the forums. I haven't seen any updates from Paul Edmonson and wondering if the problem is bigger than we know, from a technical stand point.

New tighter Google standards...and unfortunately quality content gets caught in the switches. All of my sites are down 50% since early Feb. and some are down 90% while competitors with spun content and loads of ads are ranking above me.

Ironically though, my little HP account is not down nearly that much. Lot of people especially in the niche site realm are taking a bath right now...even those with ZERO affiliate links and no adds above the fold...

My theory is to wait it out a while, and not do anything too drastic... maybe it will level out, but maybe not?

It seems my earnings are at an all time low, compared to an all time high barely 3 months ago. There are a lot of weird thing happening, probably due to several changes on hubpages. i also stumbled on a few sites that use my exact hubpage titles and name with zero association to the subject matter. strange times

I noticed that too with my hubs. There are copies all over the place on new sites. I'm also having trouble locating the abuse agents for the hosting services. I have a list of five new hosts of plagiarized hubs and they are not registered with copyright.gov. I don't know how they achieved that. But it's a way of hiding with no one to send dmca takedown requests to. Something stange is happening.

I know of that link. I've used it before, but only after getting the copy removed. I appreciate your desire to help Will, but you can't ask Google to remove indexing until after the webmaster or host has removed the plagiarized copy. The option to select via that link makes that clear: "A piece of content I am concerned about has already been removed by the webmaster but still appears among the search results"

If you know of an actual way to get Google to remove indexing when the copy still exists, please show me specifics, and let me know if you actually succeeded doing it that way.

By the way, if all you do is remove the index, you have to do it with all the popular search engines. It's more important to get those copies removed.

For me, it is more important to remove the copy from the search engines, especially if the copied content is ranking above my original article. This is most likely to lose views and income.

Also, when I first started issuing DMCA's, I found that Google would not remove the plagiarised entry from the search engine results if the copied content was not found on the infringing url. In those instances, I had to wait for it to be de-indexed naturally by Google bots.

Thank you Will. That is extremely helpful. I never tried selecting "other" before. I'm actually a little surprised that Google would remove index just because anyone submits a request. Nevertheless, I'm going to try it this way as you suggested. I do need to try requesting the same from Bing, even though I don't get much traffic from them, Bing is responsible for a small portion of traffic has dropped too.

Since contact info is not available for those new hosts, it may be easier to get all search engines to appreciate the request. I'm going to do it your way today. Thanks again.

Will, (or anyone else) what is your procedure for spun copies? Articles that are not a copy, but are obviously a copy that is spun into something that is very similar (and often unreadable) but not a direct copy?

I've got a couple dozen of those and have never filed on them because they aren't direct copies.

wilderness, Funny you ask! In my process of tracking down copies of my hubs today, I found seven idiotic articles that make no sense whatsoever. They took individual sentences from many different places all over the web and combined into a "story."

Even though only a few sentences were from my hubs, I decided to report this to Google since they need to be made aware that they are indexing content that is spun from random pages around the Internet, providing a disservice to their customers (people searching with Google).

This is useless stuff, serves no purpose, and doesn't give any meaningful information. I think they must be trying to make money from AdSense just for the traffic they generate. They must get traffic based on the various random garbage on their site.

In the box under "Identify and describe the copyrighted work" - I used the followed explanation (feel free to use it too):

Took random sentences from my content and combined with random sentences taken from other content. The mumble-jumble makes no sense as you can see. I found these copies with a Google search for the following random sentence from my content: “xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxx xxx xxxxxx”.

Replace the xxxxxx's with the content sentence you used from your hub when you found these copies.

You can list the URLs of all the spun copies you found, one per line, in the box under "Location of infringing material".

I report those mixed ones to google webspam. Get yourself the Google Webspam Report (by Google) for your internet browser and then click the flag when you see one of these sites and type in the box "spammy website with stolen content". Press OK and you're done!

You certainly can get it removed from the index without getting the copy removed. As Will says, it's in a different section which they make difficult to find.

Personally I always prefer to get the copies removed, because I will usually do that by complaining to the host and/or to Adsense. My goal is to do more than just remove the copy - if enough people make the effort to complain to Adsense, the thief will lose their Adsense account and get banned from every host they try to use, so it will put them out of business. If I really get stuck, complaining to Google is my next step.

And yes, I agree that ideally you need to complain to all the main search engines - but if I look at the source of most of my own traffic, and of HubPages as a whole, it's Google. So getting them off Google will fix most of the problem.

Yes, I always report AdSense abuse too, when they use Adsense on plagiarized copies of my articles. That has always worked — getting them to lose their business.

However, in these recent cases, none of them are using AdSense. I can spend a lot of time tracking down the abuse contact agents of those other ad agencies. I've done that before, and I don't really look forward to doing it again. I'm going to just file with Google for now as Will suggested. I want to get on with my life.

What I was saying was, you don't have to contact the abuse agent to file a legal DMCA. At least that's my understanding. If the host hasn't nominated an agent - and some never do - then they are directly responsible for handling their own DMCA's. Which means you just use their main email contact to send the DMCA.

If that wasn't the case, then every host on the planet would simply delay appointing an agent forever!

I know. Non of this is new to me as I'm sure you know, but I appreciate your input as it also helps others who read this thread.

I have always done it either way: If I find the agent (listed on copyright.gov) then I email them, and if I don't I just email to the host support or abuse emails. However, these last few days were so different since I was finding host services that had no valid contact information. One even had a phone number (123)456-7890. I'm not making that up.

A few had contact info and they were taken down as requested. I reported all the other plagiarized copies to Google to remove from their index. So I'm done for now. I need a rest.

I've seen theorizing that such pages are created solely as backlinks to the real page, the one that counts for them. Don't know if it's true, and suspect that it's a losing proposition since Google "smartened" it's SE, but it might be.

Actually, it's not odd at all. I can set up my own hosting from my laptop back home. I just need a stable IP address to point to. It could just be a handful of individuals doing this and scraping other websites entirely. Why they would do this, I have no idea, but it's not that difficult.

I don't know the answer to that question, but it's a good point and can be another reason why there are hosts that can't be tracked.

By the way, I recently learned that one of the hosts of my copied hub is a reseller host service. They actually bought bulk host services from another host, who refuses to abide by the dmca. They said they forwarded my dmca takedown request to the reseller and claim that satisfies their obligation under the safe harbor rules of the dmca.

It does to me (make sense). The reseller isn't the one with the server containing illegal work. Nevertheless, they have made a good faith effort to have that material removed from the 3rd party's (4th party?) server, but of course they cannot force them to do anything at all, any more than Google can.

A loophole, and I don't like it, but it still boils down to just who has the material. The reseller does not.

I can't comment on the legal standpoint because I'm not a lawyer either, but as wilderness pointed out — they may have found a loophole.

In the meantime, I reported to Google with two online forms: (1) AdSense usage on plagiarized content, and (2) plagiarism of my content. The first may get their AdSense canceled. The second may get it removed from indexing. It's the best I can do.

I think you are referring to something known as PBN's (Private Blog Networks). No those aren't going away anytime soon. Because these are built to look like real sites with real followers. I know quite a few people who are ranking pretty well with these.

Also, if they are spinning content and just copying and using this as their PBN, you can be happy that Google won't just deindex these domains, but would also give their main site a big drop in rankings as a result.

Thanks Marisa, the problem is that these are new hosting services that seem to have found a way to hide their contact information. None of them have copyright complaint forms and none of them are registered with copyright.gov, which is where I always find the abuse agent listed. So I'm stuck as far as doing it that way. I wrote to copyright.gov and they are going through a transition period right now where all hosts need to register online. The old way was a form with contact info that was scanned. It looks like this gives crooks a period of time to avoid listing DMCA contact info.

That would be great if they would do that. I'm surprised they don't make that a prerequisite to getting indexed. It may be because the problem is a new one, and it will only last until December of this year. Then the problem goes away since everyone needs to be registered by January 2018. So the search engines really don't need to bother with it. Companies that don't register just won't be able to host websites after January.

The DMCA process does not require the use of a form and it does not require the use of a special email. You can send an email to whatever contact address you can find for the host. Of course if they are dodgy, they will ignore you anyway, but it's worth a try.

The reason Google is willing to remove an item from the SERPs on your say-so is that you supply them with a link to both your piece and the offending copy. If they can satisfy themselves that your original is of an earlier date then the evidence is clear.

I hear you. It is very difficult finding who is hosting a website and reaching out to them lately. It shouldn't be this way. I have emailed dozens of alleged hosting companies at times, only to find out they really weren't hosting the website.

Even more painstaking, is that I found some hosting companies that won't even tell you if they are hosting a particular website because of privacy issues! I find this ridiculous and have blamed them for conspiracy of plagiarism. They then suggest me to file an abuse form with them reporting the website which wastes lots of time if they are not truly the hosting company in the first place!

I recently noticed though that the same companies that protect the identity of website owners also have abuse forms. Like nameguard has an abuse form. I yet have had the opportunity to use it, so not sure if it can help but it might be a way to get around things. I think through a company like nameguard by using their forms you can contact the website owner, problem is, you might never get a reply!

I filed many times DMCA, but don't really like it. The page with your content still remains up, and even though Google doesn't crawl it anymore, it's my understanding that it can still be reached through internal links or it can be shared through social media as a direct link. Social media can get a lot of page views these days!

The thing is, Alexadry, that the official form is not the waste of time. If a host has a system for reporting abuse, they won't accept notices any other way, so it's a waste of time writing to them in the first place.

When you find a host, don't bother writing to them. Google their name with "abuse" or "DMCA" (e.g. GoDaddy abuse) and if they have a form that must be filled in, that will give it to you.

There is a lot of discussion here about copied content being responsible for the drop in traffic. While I think it is important to corral thieves by filing DMCAs, I don't think stolen content in itself accounts for the drop.

I think it's more likely that this content is simply more visible because of the shakeup in the SERPs due to the Fred update thing. It has always been there and will always be an issue, but because of the change in the SERPs more people are noticing it. And, yes, it is possible there is some traffic siphoned away because of it, but the real problem is the change in the SERPs, not the stolen content itself.

I have a copied Hub on another account that I was unable to get taken down for reasons that make me too angry to discuss. Its on a crummy Blogger site that consists mostly of stolen content. While my original outranks it, every time a shakeup like this happens that copy rears its ugly head on the first page for those keywords. It's there now, since this update thing.

It eventually sinks into the depths where it belongs, which is what I am hoping happens once this update sorts itself out. I am trying to be optimistic that some or all of our traffic will return, but also hoping HP is working behind the scenes to make few change that might help.

On a more important note: Why Google willfully makes changes that allow things like this to happen is beyond my understanding.

Eric, this isn't a debate on what's causing the drop in traffic. None of us really know. It may even be a combination of everything that's happening.

There basically are three things going on: The Fred Algorithm, the ongoing copying of hubs, and the new rules that the copyright office is requiring hosting services to register online, with a transition period where they don't need to submit a new designation until December 2017. This gives crooks a chance to hide this year, in my opinion, and may be the reason for an uptick in plagiarism.

Fair enough. I was just concerned that some people seemed to be working under the illusion that frantically filing DMCAs would somehow correct the recent traffic loss. There are suggestions to that effect in this thread and others.

Thanks for your insight Eric and Glenn. I think we are all on the same page. I definitely think the experience and knowledge both of you share in your last posts pretty much points in the right direction as we try to understand and recover. As GodsOfRock said, we may have to wait it out a bit.

I have never found that getting somebody to remove my copy has upped my figures. So I don't think that has anything to do with the loss of traffic. I think Google has adjusted its searh engine algorythm again.

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